eating in Scotland, part 1

Scotland has a bum rap when it comes to food. Think of Scotland and you think of haggis, a local delicacy made from "lesser ingredients."

The reputation is so poor that I came close to cancelling the trip to Scotland in favor of Italy. "Let's go where they know how to cook food," I said. What a mistake that would have been.

Four of us ate three meals a day for a week and none of us had a bad meal. The Scots do a really fine job with seafood, venison, lamb, and beef. We are thinking of a seafood restaurant down by the waterfront in Oban with especially fond memories (halibut, scallops).

All of the B & B's advertise a "Scottish breakfast" that would satisfy a farm hand - porridge, eggs any way you want them, mushrooms, tomatoes ("to-MAH-toes"), various cereals, fruit, toast, jellies, orange juice, coffee. . .enough to do you for the rest of the day, or at least until you see a good place for lunch.

For lunch, you can get almost anything from fish and chips, "pub grub," soups, sandwiches, you name it. You can order haggis for lunch. Some castles and museums have both gift shops and places to order lunch, a convenient way to stay on schedule.

Speaking of haggis, see the photo above. That was the haggis I ordered as a "starter" for dinner at Culcreuch Castle. In a restaurant, you don't get the full-size, uncut haggis which is the stuff of legends and the focus of ceremonies. You do get a nice sampling, though, with veggies on the side. Did I mention "lesser ingredients?" The overall effect was more on the order of meat loaf. You get lesser ingredients in sausages, kielbasa, German wursts, and American hot dogs, all of which I love in the wurst way. Don't ask, don't tell, just eat and enjoy!

Desserts? Oh, yeah. Desserts are an art form in some restaurants. Our favorite dessert was "sticky toffee," which we tried out in different restaurants to see how many ways there are to make it (we got no two alike, all wonderful). I tried to upload a photo but Blogger is rebelling. Maybe later.

driving in Scotland, part 1

No, we aren't passing anybody. No, the photo hasn't been "flipped" left over right.

Laurel wanted to try her hand at the wheel and I was grateful. That put me in the passenger seat, which in this case meant the left side.

Driving on the left is the first thing you notice in the UK. Even as a pedestrian, you have to look right instead of left, and then look left halfway across the street.

Note the stone fence on the right side of the road. Note the narrow shoulders. Sometimes the stone fence is on the left with the same narrow clearance. This isn't too bad on a dry day if you have no tour buses hogging the road. On a rainy day the road seems narrower. We had only a day and a half of rain but my passengers thought even that was too much.

Driving in the cities is a whole 'nother story, which I'll get around to later.

scenery in Scotland, part 1

People go to Scotland for a variety of worthy reasons. Some go to play golf. Some go to drink good whisky. We met one young lady from Pennsylvania who went to Edinburgh to work on a master's degree in photography. But a lot of people, like us, go to see the historic castles, churches, and ruins that dot the countryside. These photos were taken at Jedburgh Abbey. (Click to enlarge.)







Note the ledge and crossbar above the door in the background, below the lower of the two windows. That's where Laurel was standing in this picture.











To get there, we had to go up and down these stairs. Note the toe of my shoe, bracing me against the wall to take this picture, which gives you some idea of the small size of these steps. No room for fatties, here. The spiral staircases are as amazing as the ornate stonework in the rest of the building. The steps had to be cut identically to fit the staircase. The inside corners of the steps stack on top of each other, forming a column, and the outer edges are anchored in the wall. That's a rope going around the column, our "handrail."

travels in Scotland

Just got back from a very fine but too-short nine days in Scotland. Watch this space for further details and photos, to be posted later. Right now my body is telling me it is an hour or two until sunrise and I'm going to have to sleep off the jet lag. ZZZzzzzzzz

view from my office

Sometimes you've got to stop and appreciate the beauty of the world around you, such as this view of the building next door to our building (click to enlarge):

I want a fun, frivolous subject here

I want a subject less somber, less serious, than hurricanes and the foolishness of our President and his top-level advisors such as Rummy, the Secretary of War. No, that was the old title. The current title is, Secretary of Defense.

So, the latest hurricane is going to roll into the North Atlantic in time for us to fly over it on our way to Scotland. Should be a fun view from 40,000 feet or whatever altitude we're cruising at. That's as close as I want to get to another hurricane.

And, believe it or not, a few Floridians noticed a faint treble from an earthquake in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday. Really, really faint. So now we can add earthquakes to hurricanes, tornados, sharks and alligators as reasons why you Yankees ought not to sell the family homestead and move to Florida.

The Bucs lost their opening game, the Red Sox are killing themselves, the Devil Rays can't get started, . . . no wait, here's some good news: The FSU Seminoles held on to edge Troy. Troy? TROY?

I'm still looking for a fun, frivolous subject, here. I'd share a "joke" I heard on Sunday but, nah, I'd better not. It wasn't all that funny.

Thursday, we leave for Scotland. Now, that should be a source of fun topics but you will have to wait until we got back.

the primaries are over, thank God

We just finished our primary elections in Florida, thereby (almost) putting an end to a heavy barrage of the sleaziest, slimiest election campaign ads that we've seen in a long time - that is, since the last election. In Florida, the way you run for office is to pin the liberal tail on the donkey who is your opponent. That's donkey as in jackass, not donkey as in Democrat. Even the Republicans, whose mothers undoubtedly taught them never to say unkind things about other Republicans, were trashing each other. I'm happy to say that most of the worst offenders lost their bids for office, but not all of them.

I wish I could report that Katherine Harris' political career came to an end, but she embarrassed the party leaders by pulling in almost half the vote in a four-man. . .er, four-body. . .race. This is the Katherine Harris of Election 2000 fame, the Katherine Harris who calls separation of church and state a "lie," and the Katherine Harris who immediately went on the offensive by calling Senator Bill Nelson a liberal four times in a speech that lasted less than four minutes. We have to cope with this for two more months. I'd rather cope with hurricane season, which is also in full gear.

are we all insane?

Everybody in the world is a fool except you and me, and sometimes I wonder about you. Consider these stories from this morning's newspaper:

Authorities have arrested a polygamist, head of a "church," who over the past four years has "excommunicated" men and "reassigned" their wives and children to other men, apparently without serious opposition or objection. He has about 10,000 followers. Let's see. . .how many gallons of Kool-Aid would be necessary. . .

A headline reads, "Violence obscures Iraq's gains." It turns out that the "gains" are being measured by the number of bodies showing up at the morgue, and the number for August is substantially lower than for July and for June. The terrorists must have read that story, too, because at least 50 died in Iraq today and August isn't over yet. So much for "gains" in Iraq.

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said yesterday that critics of the U.S. war "strategy" don't know their history, and are like those who tried to appease the Nazis. I'd say Rummy doesn't know his history, certainly not the history of Iraq or the Middle East. Neither he nor anybody else in the Bush Administration knew that Saddam, although a butchering murderer along the lines of Stalin, was a balance of power against Iran, Osama, and the al-Quaeda. A year after the "Axis of Evil" speech, President Bush was unaware that Muslims in Iraq were divided between the Shia and Sunnis. Rummy did not know and could not predict that the troops would have more trouble with the Fedayeen that with the overrated Republican Guard. Rummy seemed unaware of the numbers of troops and the time required to build new nations out of Germany and Japan, but instead insisted on attempting to do the job in Iraq with insufficient forces and on a ridiculously short schedule that collapsed. The Bush Administration had no strategy for the end of the war. . .but they certainly detest criticism.

Finally, to make my day, Michael "Heckuva Job" Brown says he regrets that FEMA had no plan for the day (month, year) after Katrina. His positive statements in the days after Katrina about help coming through from the federal government were just "White House talking points" to protect the President. Given the choice between lying to "protect" the President and telling the blunt truth, he lied. Now we know what "White House talking points" are. Just a pack of lies.

I could add something about John Karr, but that's old news. He must have done something bad to somebody, somewhere. Fly him back to Thailand.

And all that from Section A of the newspaper. I can understand why George W. Bush doesn't read newspapers. It will disturb your otherwise bland equanimity and might even prompt you to think.

saying goodbye to an old friend

I've just deleted the 1998 version of Quicken. I had to. I want to try a little on-line banking using Quicken but my bank, the Second National Bank of London (Kentucky, that is) insists on my using a newer version. So, I've installed the 2007 version of Quicken Basic (a dollar cheaper than the 2006 version at the local Office Depot - go figure). I'm going to miss the 1998 version because it was so clean and simple.

Why do I bother mentioning this arcane trivia? Because, of all the computer programs, I like Quicken the best. It ranks up there with e-mail, genealogy software, and the things you can do with digital photos as being Really Good Reasons to Buy a Computer. I liked the first version I installed, designed to run on DOS. The 1998 edition has worked despite upgrading to Win98, Win2000, and WinXP, and despite changing the hard drive twice. It just plugs along like the trusty Timex watch, a time-consuming thing to update but so nice to have when April 15 rolls around every year.

My regular readers of this blog are going to roll on the floor laughing when they read this because they know their father is not exactly first in line when new technology comes out. But, hey, sometimes you've gotta catch up with the rest of the world.

Ernesto, just go away

We thought the hurricane season this year was off to a slow start. Katrina, one year ago, was the eleventh named storm for 2005. This year has had four storms that posed no threat. But I kept telling myself that Hurricane Andrew was the first named storm of the 1992 season (sheesh, it seems like yesterday). Now we have this storm that has pounded Cuba and emerged into the Florida Straits, and is on its way to. . .who really knows? Take a look at the 3-day guesstimate map, which shows it going way east of where I live:

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at5+shtml/150927.shtml?3day?large

The bad news is, this is a part of Florida that doesn't need another hurricane. They were criss-crossed by three hurricanes in 2004, one right after the other:

http://img.coxnewsweb.com/C/05/92/61/image_961925.jpg

George W. Bush is an arrogant idiot

I've been reading some new books about Iraq lately. One is Cobra II, written by a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general (the three-star kind of general) and a NY Times military correspondent, who go into excruciating and well-researched detail about the missteps of the Bush Administraton and senior brass. They don't seem to have set out to make Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and company look like aggressively uninformed dolts but that's the impression they leave. "Make no mistake about that," as Dubyah likes to say.

To summarize a long story, Bush went into Iraq with several objectives and failed at all except the toppling of Saddam. They sent a barely sufficient number of troops. The success of our troops, and our U.K. allies, is a tribute to the fighting spirit of our professional Army and Marine Corps. The CIA and military intelligence continually gave no useful information or gave false reports. George Washington knew as much about the location of the British Army as our field commanders knew about the Iraqis, which is to say, practically nothing.

Bush, et al., failed to understand the religious and ethnic subtleties of the people of Iraq. They failed to anticipate the Fedayeen resistance and failed to pay sufficient attention to them. They expected parades but our troops got showered with bullets and rocket propelled grenades. Once Saddam fled the city, Bush and the top brass believed the war was over, despite the fact that we were still engaged in combat in large areas of Iraq. Like the dog who chased cars until he caught one and didn't know what to do with it, they had no plan for the day after the war ground to a conclusion. Almost immediately, they began talking of bringing the troops home. They brought the experienced field commanders home and sent in replacements. They halted the influx of new military units. Keeping the peace in Iraq requires more troops than were needed to fight their way into Baghdad, because manpower is necessary to control the borders, man checkpoints, halt looting, engage in civil affairs, and keep the economy running.

In short, there was a window open in which to bring some semblance of democracy to Iraq but it was squandered by decisions to cancel an election, dissolve the Iraqi army (leaving thousands of men unemployed), and "de-Baathisize" the public institutions such as schools and universities to the point that they were crippled. That window is slammed shut.

So, now what? "Cut and run?" That was how we left Viet Nam but this part of the world is much more incendiary. We need to stay the course but do it more intelligently. Republicans ask, do the Democrats have better alternatives? That's a fair question, and in return I ask, do the Republicans have alternatives better than what we have seen to date? We have to wait until 2008 or later to find out, sad to say.

baseball in the minor leagues - you gotta love it!

Take a close look at this man. His name is Julio De La Cruz. He is a pitcher for the Clearwater Threshers, a Class A team in the Phillies system. Last night, he pitched the entire nine innings. . . and he pitched a no-hitter. Five strike-outs, and only one walk. There was one error charged to the third baseman that some scorers might have called a hit, but last night it was an error. A no-hitter is extraordinarily difficult in baseball. This is only the second one in Clearwater's 21-year history. You don't often see pitchers going from start to finish like he did, either. Start collecting his baseball cards, folks, we will be seeing more of him!

no party this year, she said

Boy, was she wrong! Surprise! And this photo includes only the family members who were able to come. The family came from California and Colorado, and Boston, and our oldest and dearest friends came down from Tallahassee.

There's one good thing about a birthday with a zero in it: You get to wait another ten years before you have to worry about it again. I promise, there will be a party then, too.

happy birthday!

If somebody had told this pretty young Michigan gal that she'd go to college in Florida and get a master's degree, that she would have four babies of her own and they would grow up to be happy and successful adults, that she would be a breast cancer survivor, that she'd still be married to the same guy after 34 years and, just before turning 60, she would start a new career working to protect children from abusive and broken homes who are at risk of becoming homeless or worse, I think she'd still have that same sweet smile!

actual bumper stickers

I wish I had one, or more, of these bumper stickers:

Blind faith in bad leadership is not patriotism.

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.

If you supported Bush, a yellow ribbon won't make up for it.

Poverty, health care, & homelessness are moral issues.

Of course it hurts. You're getting screwed by an elephant.

Bush lied, and you know it.

Religious fundamentalism: a threat abroad, a threat at home.

God bless everyone (no exceptions).

Bush spent your Social Security on his war.

Pro America, anti Bush.

Who would Jesus bomb?

Feel safer now?

I'd rather have a president who screwed his intern than one who screwed his country.

Jesus was a social activist -- that is a liberal.

My values? Free speech. Equality. Liberty. Education. Tolerance.

Is it 2008 yet?

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." -- Thomas Jefferson.

Don't blame me. i voted against Bush -- twice!

Annoy a conservative: think for yourself.

Visualize impeachment.

Hey Bush! Where's Bin Laden?

Corporate media = mass mind control.

Stop mad cowboy disease.

George W. Bush: making terrorists faster than he can kill them.

Keep your theocracy off my democracy.

Democrats are sexy. Whoever heard of a good piece of elephant?

Corporate media: weapons of mass deception.

Stem cell research is pro life.

Hate, greed, ignorance: weapons of mass destruction.

Honor our troops: demand the truth.

Rebuild iraq? Why not spend 87 (now 400) billion on America?

Fact: Bush oil
1999 - $19 barrel
2006 - $70 barrel

The last time religion controlled politics, people got burned at the stake.

I'll give up my choice when John Roberts gets pregnant.

Scotland

We are going to Scotland in September. As usual, I have put off the little details like reservations, but now I'm seriously checking out B & B's and small hotels and small castles, and I'm calculating mileage and driving times from place to place. Now that July is almost over with and September starts tomorrow, for planning purposes, it is time to Get Serious and start making those reservations. The big Edinburgh Festival ends a few days before we arrive, which means their tourist season will be winding down, which makes it possible to find places to stay in the city even this late. We like to avoid crowds, and I want to drive around with as few other crazy Americans driving on the "wrong side" of the road as possible.

I've been "flying" around Scotland on Google Earth, flying low to see the hills rise up as I cross the country. I've also started reading Kidnapped, one of those books I should have read as a kid but didn't. Near the beginning of the book young David Balfour goes to Edinburgh and sees an "islet" in the middle of the Firth of Forth. On Google Earth, I'm seeing what may have been the island Robert Louis Stevenson was writing about. When we get there, I'll have to drop by to see if he's sitting out in front of the Hawes Inn, or the ghost of him since he's buried on a Pacific Island. If the Hawes Inn was fictional I'm sure some canny Scots have created one. I'll have to buy a drink for old RLS even if his ghost can't pick up the glass.

My ancestors lived in Scotland, somewhere in the vicinity of Loch Lomond, north of Glasgow. They left, one step ahead of the law, and went to Ireland. After getting pounded between the English and the Irish, between Protestants and Catholics, some of them got brave enough or desperate enough to sail to the New World. That was more than eight generations ago, in the 1700's. One of the reservations I've already made is to spend a night in a modest little castle that once belonged to the clan chief, when my clan still had a chief. I don't think I'll buy a drink for the old chief. His ghost can probably pick up the glass and drain it.

Anagrams

I was never worth much when it came to anagrams, the silly mental exercise of rearranging the letters in a word or phrase to make a new word or phase. My mother was very good at it, but this is not an inherited trait. I am telling you this so you will not suspect that I had anything to do with the following except steal them shamelessly from an e-mail and copy them here while waiting for traffic on Intracounty 275 to thin out.

At the risk of insulting your intelligence, for each pair of words or phrases, rearrange the first one to get the second one:

DORMITORY
DIRTY ROOM

PRESBYTERIAN
BEST IN PRAYER

ASTRONOMER
MOON STARER

DESPERATION
A ROPE ENDS IT

THE EYES
THEY SEE

GEORGE BUSH
HE BUGS GORE

THE MORSE CODE
HERE COME DOTS

SLOT MACHINES
CASH LOST IN ME

ANIMOSITY
IS NO AMITY

SNOOZE ALARMS
ALAS NO MORE Z 'S

A DECIMAL POINT
IM A DOT IN PLACE

THE EARTHQUAKES
THAT QUEER SHAKE

ELEVEN PLUS TWO
TWELVE PLUS ONE

MOTHER-IN-LAW
WOMAN HITLER

My favorite of this bunch:
ELECTION RESULTS
LIES - LET'S RECOUNT

news you can use from the Discovery Channel

My son and I spent quite a bit of time learning all about dung beetles and sharks on the Discovery Channel. We missed the program about how to escape a gator, though. Fortunately, one young man here in Florida was paying attention:

http://www.wesh.com/news/9569904/detail.html

car maintenance - a "whew" experience this time

Today it was time for my car's air conditioning system to get the fishy eyeball from the guys at a shop who repair a/c systems for a living.

I knew this was going to cost me, big time. In the good old days, the mechanic would say it needs a can or two of Freon and that would keep it going for the rest of the summer. Now they don't use Freon and they are smart enough to say there's some reason why your system lost so much of the refrigerant gas. That's the cue for saying that you need a new compressor or condensor or evaporator, or some other odd part they haven't sold enough of lately. . .none of which is cheap. . .plus labor and taxes.

You can imagine my shock upon getting the expected bad-news phone call this morning. The shock was, it wasn't bad news. My a/c is fully charged and working fine, and was blowing cold air. Their best guess was, when the fans for my radiator conked out, that also affected the a/c system. Because I learned long ago that you don't run the a/c when it is low on Freon or whatever they use nowadays, and because I assumed that was why the a/c was blowing warm air, I hadn't given it a chance to prove itself after getting the radiator fixed.

The price for all their trouble: $16.00 including tax.

It is good to know where honest mechanics are. They could have sold me $400 worth of repairs today and I wouldn't have known the difference. Come to think of it, the garage that gave me five pounds of air for a tire on Monday could have sold me a front-end alignment and my ignorance would have been bliss.

Next time I have a problem, I know who to see.

car maintenance - getting tired

There are some stories I shouldn't tell on myself because they make me look like an "idjit." But I'll share this one with you because it may save you some time and money some day.

Our daughter - our West Coast daughter - was home for the weekend. She was driving our new(er) car. Because (unlike her parents) she hadn't gotten used to the "feel" of it again, she noticed something we hadn't noticed. It was drifting to the right. Aha, we thought. It must be the old front-end alignment.

I took it to my garage this morning. I got there early because I'd taken our daughter to Tampa International even earlier. Told him my story. Could be the front-end alignment, I said knowingly. Or it could be the tire, he said.

It was the tire. The right front tire, which had five pounds less air than the left front tire, which naturally makes it want to drift to the right.

Well, as long as you have it, go ahead and change the oil, I said.

At the end of the day the report was, you also need brakes on the front end, he said. Since we are going out of town and I don't like to wait for trouble to come to me, the brake job will be next on the list. Tomorrow. And on Wednesday the other car is due to have the air conditioner repaired.

Sheesh. These are maintenance-free cars, for the most part, but our long hot summer is wearing them down as much as it is wearing their owners down.